Women and Parent Care: Giving Until it Hurts?

Women today are living longer, entering the workforce in greater numbers, having fewer children, and staying childless longer (Brody, 2003; Marks, 1998). Middle-aged women, therefore, are increasingly likely to have elderly parents while they are raising children and working full-time jobs. When these women serve as parent caregivers, they become what Elaine Brody terms “women in the middle”—typically middle-aged and caught between conflicting roles and values, and the demands of children, parents, partners, and the workplace. Brody addresses this dilemma in the second edition of her book about parental caregiving.

The author's major objective is to help readers understand the parent care experience and how it affects caregivers: physically, emotionally, and in terms of occupational and familial well-being. She attempts to achieve this goal using the firsthand accounts of caregivers, primarily daughters and daughters-in-law of different ages. She divides the book into five sections. Part I contains comprehensive background information, including everything from caregiving myths to the values, demographics, and financial issues that have led to women being caregivers caught in the middle. Brody describes the nature of parent care and reviews research on its multifaceted effects on caregivers. The second section incorporates caregivers' voices. Interview excerpts are used to explore issues and themes (e.g., caregiving as a woman's role) in caring for a parent. Part III, the longest section at about 140 pages, also uses caregiver interview data and explores diversity in parent care. Brody includes separate segments on daughters who are married, widowed, divorced, never-married, and on daughters-in-law, prominently featuring case studies. The author then addresses the impact of racial/ethnic diversity and of work outside the home on the caregiving experience. The final two shorter portions of the book include chapters on available caregiving services (highlighting the experience of nursing home placement) and on future research, policy, and practice directions.

Brody succeeds in capturing the experiences of women in the middle. She is particularly passionate when debunking myths about elder care, such as the idea that families provide less parent care today. She also addresses the commonly held notions of “role reversal” and the “second childhood” for aging parents (p. 123). Brody presents cogent arguments to refute these notions. While acknowledging, for instance, that caregivers perform tasks for elderly parents that are similar to those provided for young children, she notes, “A young mother's feelings about incontinence in her baby … are not in any way similar to an adult child's feelings about incontinence in her elderly parent” (p. 124). The reader can easily imagine the unique pain for both the elderly mother and daughter when certain personal cares must be performed. That pain must only be intensified by the knowledge that time will not produce improvement as it does for a developing child.

Brody also very effectively examines how caregiving differs based on marital and employment status. The author explores, for example, ways in which spouses and children can simultaneously serve as supports and additional stressors (as competing demands) for married caregivers. She also discusses the unique situation of never-married daughters who may be caring for the person with whom they have their most intimate human bond. These sections are even more powerful because of the inclusion of case studies and the words of caregivers, who poignantly describe the rewards and pain of parent care. The cases help the reader to appreciate the diversity within, not just between, these groups of women. The chapter on daughters without partners, for instance, includes a daughter who finds caring for her mother more rewarding than the job she enjoyed and another unmarried daughter who, in contrast, uses a prison metaphor to describe her situation.

The case studies are also important from a feminist perspective, allowing women's stories to be heard in their own voices. Their words, along with Brody's, also emphasize why parent care is a critical topic for women. One interviewee asserts:

Brody, too, argues that women experience more stress and strain as caregivers than men. The author also notes an interesting tension in attitudes about parent care. She states that surveyed women often express egalitarian beliefs about gender roles in care-giving and support the idea of using professional care services. By contrast, themes identified in interviews with actual caregivers include: parent care as a woman's personal job, the belief that she should try to make everyone in the family happy, and persistent guilt for not doing even more.

Despite the many strengths of Brody's work, there were places where I wanted to see more recent data and more information. I hoped to see even more detail about the recruitment and selection of interviewees, the interview structure, and the specific methods used to identify interview themes, so I could assess more effectively the representativeness of these women's experiences. Kramer (1997) suggests that examinations of caregiving effects are enhanced by incorporating a formal theoretical framework and comparing and contrasting the well-being of caregivers and non-caregivers. Although their stories obviously would not be central to the book, I wondered if interviews with noncaregivers might provide context for assessing the role conflict and well-being of care-givers. Finally, I was hoping for more attention to cross-cultural and multicultural perspectives on parent care, including diverse views on aging. The existing chapter is relatively brief at 13 pages and contains no case studies or interviewee comments. I was also disappointed not to see more emphasis on the interaction of multiple aspects of diversity (e.g., gender and culture). That intersection is often explored in the multicultural literature (Dion & Dion, 2004; Martin, 2000).

Overall, however, Brody achieves her goal of helping readers to understand the subjective experience of parent care. She also makes a compelling case for parent care as an important issue for women, one that certainly will become more so as our population ages.